[AAACE-NLA] A Holiday Bon Bon for Everyone

[Gail Spangenberg]

Friends, I am pleased to share this wonderful bon bon with you. It is  
authored by Samuel Halperin, who was in on the founding of our adult  
education system. Sam is a member of the new National Commission on  
Adult Literacy and, I am proud to say, a member of CAAL'S board of  
directors. Enjoy, remember, and dare to hope. Merry Holidays and  
Happy New Year. Gail Spangenberg






REFLECTIONS ON THE FORTIETH BIRTHDAY OF THE ADULT



EDUCATION ACT OF 1966



Samuel Halperin

  December 22, 2006



In November 1966, the United States took a small, but potentially  
momentous, legislative step to support a federally aided network of  
adult education providers under the Adult Education Act of 1996.  
(Technically, the Act is Title III of the Elementary and Secondary  
Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended).

Who would have guessed then that this relatively unheralded act would  
spur a national network providing education and literacy services to  
over 2.5 million adult learners annually, including one million 16-24  
year-olds, about half of whom study English as a second language?

With hindsight, making sure that adults have a second chance to raise  
their literacy skills and continue their education beyond high school  
would seem to be clearly in the public interest. Yet, this obvious no- 
brainer required no less than a massive realignment of Congressional  
attitudes, a perceived serious threat to national security, and quite  
possibly a presidential assassination to turn a simple idea into  
legislative reality.

The legislative paths to enactment of the Adult Education Act merit  
reflection in this 40th anniversary year because they demonstrate how  
extremely malleable, porous, and often quirky is the process of  
making our laws, and also because it illuminates the many  
opportunities for advocates who perceive opportunities and know how  
to seize them to make progress in the public interest.

Here are brief personal memories of those early days, as viewed from  
my experience as an executive branch “lobbyist” for Presidents John  
F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson:*

In the early 1960s, adult educators were barely a presence in the  
halls of Congress.

“None of its advocates,” notes veteran educator Thomas Sticht, “was  
having much success getting adult education or adult literacy  
education implemented in federal legislation.”**

Ever since the demands of World War I had revealed how poorly  
prepared for military service were so many potential recruits --  
intellectually through very low literacy as well as physically, an  
Adult Basic Education bill (ABE) had been intermittently introduced  
in Congress beginning in 1918, and then promptly ignored.

In a Congress long dominated by southern conservatives, “adult basic  
education” became conflated with efforts by liberals and the growing  
civil rights movement to teach “Negroes” how to pass the literacy  
tests that southern states had erected as effective barriers to the  
exercise of voting rights.  (Southerners also noted with suspicion  
that the U.S. Office of Education’s small adult education branch was  
headed, and almost exclusively staffed, by a de facto segregated  
staff of distinguished African American educators in a federal agency  
where Black senior executives were notable mostly by their absence.)

After the defeat of President Kennedy’s education proposals in  
1961-62, his Administration devised an omnibus education bill, the  
National Education Improvement Act of 1963 (NEIA), consisting of 14  
parts and incorporating everything from teacher salaries, vocational  
education, public libraries, student financial aid, higher education  
construction, and several long-languishing proposals, including adult  
basic education.  Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, leading  
the NEIA legislative effort, knew that the entire 14-part package  
would not survive the church-state hurdles that had doomed earlier  
Kennedy proposals, but hoped that it might reduce the internecine  
warfare then prevailing among Washington’s many diverse and  
fragmented education associations.

Through hard work by House and Senate education committees headed,  
respectively, by Rep. Adam Clayton Powell and Sen. Wayne Morse, major  
parts of NEIA advanced in early 1963. But progress soon stalled as  
House and Senate chairs and various education associations quarreled  
and checkmated each other.

It took the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon  
Johnson’s rise to vigorous leadership to open the legislative  
floodgates.  By year’s end, major bills for vocational and higher  
education were signed into law.  Indeed, by the end of 1964, 12 of  
the less controversial parts of the NEIA had become law.

During that period, too, several developments made it conceivable  
that adult education, with its anti-poverty focus, could at last get  
attention on Capitol Hill.  In 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an  
assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Labor, was struck by  
the fact that among potential draftees under the Selective Service  
System at least one-third were found unfit for induction due to poor  
health or mental limitations, that is very low levels of literacy.   
(Analysts believed that if all 18 year-olds had been examined, fully  
one-half would be found unfit.). At the urging of Moynihan, Secretary  
of Labor Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and  
General Lewis Hershey of the Selective Service System, President  
Kennedy ordered a Task Force on Manpower Conservation to develop  
appropriate plans for federal action.  The Task Force report, One- 
Third of a Nation, was delivered to President Johnson on January 1,  
1964.  The report did not call for immediate legislation, nor is  
there any evidence that it led to Congressional action. Nevertheless,  
the critical connections between low literacy, national security, and  
poverty were given new and high-level visibility in the Nation’s  
Capital.  A mood was fast developing that some kind of federal action  
was long overdue.

Then, in May 1964, President Johnson committed his administration to  
wage War on Poverty.  He directed federal agencies to suggest what  
they could contribute to the development of what soon became the  
Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and its new federal agency, the  
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

Assigned as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s liaison  
to the OEO legislative task force headed by Adam Yarmolinsky, I  
argued there that several parts of the still-pending NEIA bill had  
relevance for any effort to combat poverty, and that such  
Administration proposals as adult basic education (ABE), libraries  
and college work study could be appropriately incorporated in the  
emerging OEO bill.

Future OEO director Sargent Shriver and Yarmolinsky, however,  
rejected any targeted earmarking of anti-poverty funds, preferring to  
wield the broadest possible blanket authority to wage war on poverty  
in all its forms.  Moreover, OEO people wanted nothing to do with a  
state grant program like ABE that would, they argued, be administered  
by unsympathetic, possibly even racist, state and local officials.   
Knowing that passage of the OEO bill in the Congress depended on  
gaining the support of southerners, many of whom saw ABE as a wedge  
to undercut state literacy voting laws, ABE would have no place in  
the fast-developing OEO bill.

But legislative possibilities changed dramatically when Congress  
passed the historic Voting Rights Act of 1964.  The power of state  
literacy tests to thwart voting by Blacks would sharply decline, if  
not entirely disappear.  The mood and tactics among southern  
lawmakers shifted accordingly.  As one leading southern senator said  
in closed caucus, “If we are going to have to let ‘them’ vote, we had  
better be sure they can at least read.”

In the House of Representatives, responsibility for overseeing the  
contents of the draft Economic Opportunity bill was assigned to a  
subcommittee chaired by Carl Perkins, the ranking majority member on  
the House Education and Labor Committee, who represented an East  
Kentucky district characterized by high poverty and even higher  
illiteracy.  During a meeting of Committee members and our HEW  
legislative staff to consider the provisions of the draft OEO bill, I  
raised with Mr. Perkins the relevance of including HEW’s proposals  
for ABE and college work-study.  Mr. Perkins immediately and  
enthusiastically embraced incorporating both provisions in the OEO  
bill when it was reported to the House of Representatives for its  
approval.  Despite opposition from OEO to these inclusions, Perkins  
argued that the added provisions would strengthen support for the  
overall bill.  Thus, when President Johnson signed the Economic  
Opportunity Act on August 20, 1964 (Public Law 88-452), its Title  
IIB, the Adult Basic Education Act, authorized OEO to make grants to  
state education agencies to advance adult literacy. OEO promptly  
assigned administration of the two new programs to the U.S. Office of  
Education.

On March 1, 1966, ABE and the college work-study legislative  
authorizations were formally transferred from OEO to the Office of  
Education.  These transfers were much less the result of adult  
educators’ lobbying efforts than of  OEO’s desire to rid itself of an  
unwelcome burden and, more especially, of the energetic campaign of  
Edith Green of Oregon, subcommittee chairman for higher education  
issues on the House Committee on Education and Labor.  Mrs. Green, a  
formidable education leader, was strongly critical of President  
Johnson’s war on poverty and, particularly, of the powers and funds  
it conferred on the new OEO “super-czar agency” to intervene in the  
traditional operations of many levels of government, including  
schools. Amid mounting sharp criticism of OEO’s initial ventures in  
community action and legal services, Mrs. Green met scant resistance  
to “returning” HEW’s original proposals to the U.S. Office of Education.

Thus, forty years ago, the Adult Education Act was born, a small but  
durable foundation stone on which to build a much-needed adult  
learning system for the American people.

Today, however, research shows that 93 million Americans over age 16  
lack the literacy and skill levels needed to function effectively in  
a globally competitive, economically challenging world, one  
characterized by massive in-immigration of low-literacy workers. We  
must question whether a 40 year-old, generally under-funded adult  
education “system,” staffed 80 percent by part-time instructors and  
often detached from the needs of cutting-edge economic developments,  
is even faintly adequate to meeting the challenges of the 21st Century.

This is clearly not America’s moment to rest on the anniversary  
laurels of 1966. Rather, we must forge ahead to help our nation’s  
children and adults become the most skilled, the most literate, and  
the most empowered generations in our national history.



* As Assistant U.S. Commissioner of Education for Legislation and  
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislation in the Department of  
Health, Education and Welfare during the years 1961-1969.

** Sticht, T. (2002). The Rise of the Adult Education and Literacy  
System of the United States: 1600-2000, in
J. Comings, B. Garner and C. Smith (eds.) Annual Review of Adult  
Learning and Literacy, vol. 3, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp.10-43.




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